24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Escape From Pretoria

Dir: Francis Annan

In 1978, ANC members Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee (Daniel Radcliffe and Daniel Webber) were sent to Pretoria Prison in South Africa for a series of leaflet bombings in protest against the government and its apartheid regime. They immediately began plotting their escape; observing the guards keys and cutting wooden replicas. 

You couldn’t accuse Francis Annan’s film (his first widely released feature, following shorts and TV work) of lacking focus. The preliminaries are dealt with quickly, with Jenkin and Lee’s last leaflet bombing, their arrest and their trial all neatly dealt with within the first 12 minutes or so. The politics are given context just as quickly, but the film assumes you understand what apartheid was and settles into its main focus; the meticulous preparations for the escape of Jenkin, Lee and Leonard Fontaine (Mark Leonard Franklin), a fictionalised version of third escapee Alex Moumbaris.

The process scenes are interesting; the trial and error of making keys precise enough to work and finding ways to hide the various implements needed for the escape. Annan is also able to leech painful tension out of practice runs of the escape. Because the replica keys are made of wood there is a constant, gnawing, nervousness that one might break off in a lock, and in one sequence the tiny creak of a cupboard door is enough to set us on edge. What we miss is some of the behind the scenes process, which could have added greater context to a film that often makes it feel as though this plan was entirely, if meticulously, improvised. A little reading demonstrates that’s far from true.

In focusing in so completely on process, Annan and his co writers sacrifice some character writing. Tim is the stoic hero whose resolve and planning are carrying the day, Leonard the family man missing his kid. Stephen Lee on the other hand, almost entirely disappears. Daniel Webber is fine in the role, but I couldn’t tell you much about Lee’s personality. Radcliffe is also pretty good, his accent wobbles from time to time, but his natural nervous energy works particularly well in a scene in which the keys are almost discovered, as we can see his Jenkin holding panic just below the surface.

The issue with Escape From Pretoria isn’t that it’s a bad film, it has a few standout moments (the use of a plunger to add tension in the final scene comes to mind), but most of it feels pretty standard issue. Everything; acting, camerawork, writing, is solid but there is little inspired here, little we’ve not seen before. At its best the film resembles Escape From Alcatraz, but that’s not entirely to its benefit, because it never meets that level and doesn’t really utilise some of the meatier political context available to distinguish itself from that or many other prison break movies.

★★½

24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Blood Machines and Spookies

Blood Machines

Dir: Seth Ickerman

Synthwave hasn’t found a mainstream moment since the Drive soundtrack, but it has carved out quite a niche as an underground scene. Soaked in the influence of the 80s, and particularly of John Carpenter both as a musician and as a filmmaker. The music readily conjures sci-fi imagery even on a first listen and Carpenter Brut and their regular directorial collaborator Seth Ickerman trade heavily on all of those influences in this 50 minute hybrid of mid-length film and music video, which trades on the same imagery they have been employing in their previous videos.

The story, such as it is, finds two men (Anders Heinrichsen and Christian Erickson) in charge of a spaceship, they have just shot down an enemy ship and taken an enemy soldier (Elisa Laskowski) prisoner. Unbeknownst to them, the ship was alive. The ship’s essence becomes a beautiful woman and a galactic chase ensues.

The dialogue isn’t great and the acting (all in English) is a bit ropey, but Ickerman’s imagery - if overly heavy on gratuitous nudity - is striking, folding Carpenter Brut’s recurring motifs in fairly naturally and employing some excellent CGI for what can’t have been a large budget. Ultimately though, the score is the star. If you like synthwave and in particular Carpenter Brut’s brand of the genre, this will work for you, though you do have to wait a little longer than is ideal for the first time the music kicks into high gear.

At 50 minutes, this is overextended, and it’s hard not to wish the writing and acting had been more of a focus, because there’s the kernel of a decent short film here, even apart from the score. As an extended music video though, there’s plenty for fans to enjoy both visually and aurally. The third star below is strictly for those fans.

★★★

Spookies

Dir: Eugenie Joseph, Thomas Doran, Brendan Faulkner

There are auteurs in the horror and exploitation genres, but you do have to remember that the exploitation part of that equation sometimes applies off screen as much as it does on, and bottom line often takes precedence over a director’s vision. Spookies is definitely one of those cases. It began life as Twisted Souls, about a group of teenagers (played by unknowns, but for Charlotte Alexandra—here Charlotte Seeley—known to arthouse fans for Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and Catherine Breillat’s controversial debut, A Real Young Girl) who are trapped in a house by a Warlock who wants to use them to raise his bride from the dead. Bolted on to this were new scenes with an entirely different cast and extra creature effects.

Spookies entirely bears out its messy origins. It’s hard to imagine that Twisted Souls would have been any good in itself. What remains of co directors Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran’s work is basically a boring version of the original Evil Dead. Their characters establish little presence, indeed they’re barely even stereotypes, and the acting is middling at best. The story doesn’t hang together in these sections, particularly frustrating is the fact that, for me at least, it never became clear why these kids needed to become victims in order for the Warlock to get his wife back (she’s walking around long before the bulk of the deaths occur). In story and character terms, the extra scenes directed by Eugenie Joseph add little besides running time, always feeling untethered from the rest of the film and making the storytelling even more confusing.

What Spookies does have going for it, in both of its constituent parts, is some enjoyable practical creature effects. Effects team members like Gabe Bartalos and John Dods went on to more notable work, Bartalos recently branching out as a director. The work here displays budgetary limitations, but the design is always excellent, even when it’s clear that articulation was limited (see the Grim Reaper puppet and the spider monster, among others). The effects can’t paper over all the cracks in the film, but they do make it lively enough to be fun if you’ve got a soft spot for slightly ropey 80s horror.

Spookies is what it is: a movie that appears to have been held together with sticky tape and good will. There’s a sense that the cast are having fun and the effects crew in particular are trying hard, the film doesn’t add up to very much, but at 85 minutes it’s worth catching just for the kind of practical effects we seldom see these days.

★★½

24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Tammy and the T-Rex [Gore Cut]

Dir: Stewart Raffill

Boy meets girl. Boy is beaten up by girl’s psycho ex. Boy is murdered by a mad scientist who transplants boy’s brain into an animatronic T-Rex. Boy/T-Rex goes on a bloody rampage, before finding his girlfriend and convincing her he’s her boyfriend. Girl and T-Rex go on the run together. [Sings] “Tale as old as time…”

A lot of questions went through my mind as I was watching Tammy and the T-Rex. The one that recurred most often was this: “Who was this made for?” Shot in this R Rated version, with some splattery but often inept effects, cut down to a PG-13 for its initial 1994 video release and now restored to its full ‘glory’, neither cut seems to have an answer for this question. For the most part, this is a teen comedy, but even the PG-13 material has a strange darkness to it, with Tammy’s (Denise Richards) ex stalking her and threatening both her and her new boyfriend Michael (Paul Walker) and the T-Rex murdering a whole lot of random people, albeit less graphically in the original version. In both cuts, despite the darkness of some of the story elements, the tone is pitched towards 8-year-olds, except when it’s not, like in the final scene, in which an underwear-clad Richards does a sexy dance number for reasons too astronomically idiotic to go into here And so, I ask again, who was this supposed to be for?

Tammy and the T-Rex (or Tanny and the Teenage T-Rex, as my screener’s titles had it, despite the fact Tammy’s name is always clearly pronounced with an M, not an N) is technically a bad movie. Richards does her level best, but she’s hamstrung by the terrible material and fails to display the kind of comic timing she would show a few years later in Drop Dead Gorgeous. She and Walker are a cute enough couple, and there’s a little chemistry there, but asking Richards to replicate that with an animatronic T-Rex was never going to work. That mission isn't helped by the T-Rex itself, and least of all by the hilariously cheap hands used every time it has to interact with something. 

Try as everyone might, there’s never a moment that gets past the essential ridiculousness of the premise. And yet, that’s why the film works at a certain level. The restored gore is largely rubbish, and actually the film might be even funnier without it, because clips of the PG-13 version are even more comically stilted as they cut around the blood and swearing. While Richards and Walker aren’t bad within the confines of the script, the same can’t be said of the cartoony performances of most of the rest of the cast. Chief offenders are Terry Kiser as the scientist who transplants Michael’s brain into the T-Rex, playing the role as if he’s in some sort of overacting Olympics and Theo Forsett as Tammy’s camp gay best friend Byron, who is the butt of one of the film’s more mean-spirited jokes, from the sheriff’s deputies who are presumably meant as comic relief. 

When it is trying to be funny, Tammy and the T-Rex largely misses the mark, but Ellen Dubin genuinely seems to be having a blast as Kiser’s sidekick, and scores a couple of laughs. The few gags that hit are pretty good (look for one when Tammy, Byron and the T-Rex are cornered by the cops late in the film) and the unintentional comedy does make up the dearth of honest laughter. 

Honestly, your reaction to the title of this film probably tells you whether you’ll enjoy it. Imagine a film called Tammy and the T-Rex. Imagine how silly, how cheap, how comically inept it could be. Imagine how weird, singular and engagingly bizarre it could be. Tammy and the T-Rex is both of those movies. It’s not good, but at this point, who on Earth is coming to it expecting it to be good? Sit down and marvel at the cinematic car crash unfolding in front of your eyes. You’ll be entertained, just probably not the way Stewart Raffill had hoped for.

★★½